HOWTO: Create radically smaller images for your minimalist blog
Inspired by Low-tech magazine’s solar powered website, I searched the web to find out how to create a ‘stippled’ effect for images. This reduced the size of an 2.2MB image to a mere 30.6KB, which if I’m not mistaken, is a reduction in filesize of over 95%! Here’s how to do it, using free and open source software.
0. Download and install GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
1. Open the image you want to convert in GIMP
2. Resize the image to the maximum width of your blog (~600px in my case) by going to the Image menu and then to ‘Scale Image…’
3. Convert the image to greyscale by going back to the Image menu then Mode and selecting ‘Greyscale’
(optional step: wash out the image by going to the Colours menu then Levels and change the number in the box under ‘Output levels’ to 180)
4. Convert the image to indexed colours by again going to the Image menu then Mode and this time selecting ‘Indexed…’
In the box that appears:
- Under Colourmap choose ‘Use black and white (1-bit) palette’
- Ensure box ‘Remove unused and duplicate colours from colourmap’ is checked
- From the drop-down Colour dithering option choose ‘Floyd-Steinberg (normal)’
- Press the Convert button
5. Export the image by going to the File menu and selecting ‘Export As…’ In the box that appears, type in a filename that ends in ‘png’ (e.g. image.png)
This post is Day 16 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com
That’s well and good, but I have some 10,000 images to resize…
I’m using the Smush plugin for WordPress to try and reduce the size of existing images: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit
But, actually, there’s nothing much wrong with deciding that, from this point onwards, I’ll try to do better 🙂
If you have an android, Imagepipe is one nifty app that does this for you.
Hi Doug,
Your low energy experience is fascinating. I did wonder about a raspberry pi and solar panel for a while, but living in a flat in Scotland I didn’t get past thinking about it.
If you are doing a lot of this on your desktop you might find imageMagick a handy thing. Something like
`convert photoname.jpg -scale 600x -colorspace Gray -ordered-dither h4x4a outpicture.gif`
works for me, I am sure there are better parameters
Thanks John! I’ll give that a try 🙂